9/14/2001 @ 6:34PM

The Cost Of Being Osama Bin Laden

Osama bin
Laden
Osama bin Laden
, the suspected mastermind of the coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, is the heir to a Saudi billionaire, who himself controls a fortune widely estimated at $300 million. That sum is large anywhere, but in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is based, it can command an empire.

Afghanistan is so poor that the World Bank doesn’t even estimate its gross domestic product. Its people earn so little that an army of 15,000 soldiers can be maintained for just $35,000 a month, according to a source close to the Afghan military.

Bin Laden’s personal fortune derives from an inheritance from his father, a construction billionaire. Despite his wealth, the Saudi government in 1994 revoked bin Laden’s citizenship, in part due to the urging of the U.S., for agitating against state policy, especially the kingdom’s military alliance with America during the Persian Gulf War, says Amin Tarzi, a Middle East researcher at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, who is of Afghan origin.

It is always cheaper to destroy than to build. But to fully imagine how far bin Laden’s wealth goes, and how powerful it makes him, consider Afghanistan, which the World Bank calls “one of the world’s poorest and least developed” countries in the world.

The CIA World Fact Book estimates the Afghan gross domestic product at $21 billion as of 1999. (The CIA estimate is in terms of purchasing-power parity, not from conversions at official currency-exchange rates.) This figure means that the country, with a population of 25.8 million, has a GDP per capita of $800. America’s GDP per capita is $33,900.

The nation’s wealth has declined over the past two decades, as productive activity has been secondary to war, including the nearly 10-year Soviet military occupation, which ended in 1989. During that conflict, one-third of the population fled the country, with Pakistan and Iran sheltering a combined peak figure of more than 6 million refugees, the CIA says. A civil war still rages.

Nearly everyone with education has fled the country. Telephone service is limited. As of 1998, just 13% of the nation’s highways were paved. The U.S. could bomb the country, but there is not much worth bombing.

What wealth exists is mostly from agriculture and mining. The country had gained substantial revenue from its role as the world’s leading producer of opium poppies and as the center of the world heroin trade, says Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. But recently that trade has been nearly shut down at the insistence of the Afghan government and its neighbors Russia and Iran, which have fought the massive drug trade.

Into this poverty steps the Arab centi-millionaire. Bin Laden is believed to have a role in the heroin trade. But most of his money is tied up in businesses, including banks and cement factories in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Tarzi says. Bin Laden also has access to charitable foundations, some of which are funded in other Arab countries and even the West. These funds are totally untaxed and unregulated, Tarzi says.

Bin Laden is one of a group of so-called Afghan Arabs who have found their way into the backward, landlocked nation. Some fought against the Soviet Union, with U.S. support, and then learned organizational and military skills. The fundamentalist Taliban government calls them “guests.”

Because the country is so poor, the Taliban depends inordinately on rich Arabs for financial support. The Afghan Arabs “have a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban. Essentially they pay an enormous amount of rent,” Cohen says. Bin Laden married Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s 13-year-old daughter, and he reportedly has two other wives.

No one knows the size of bin Laden’s organization, what he pays the Taliban or how much he pays his followers. But in a country with exports of just $80 million, he can easily afford a private army. His organization is said to be loose and allied with others with similar interests–that is, a branch of Islam rooted in the seventh century.

As with other criminal families, ties are based on intense loyalty. Being a demon in the West has made bin Laden a hero to many in Afghanistan and among some Arabs elsewhere. This status, in addition to his wealth, cements his power, Tarzi says.

If bin Laden’s businesses give him access to, say, $10 million per year, he could employ 12,000 Afghanis at $800 annually (the GDP per capita). Few Afghans have access to that kind of money since in cash terms the per capita GDP would be much less.

Funding an organization with operations in the West is, of course, more expensive. But bin Laden can easily afford to employ the 50 people said to be involved in the Sept. 11 attacks and hundreds more. Certainly the entire operation, as “sophisticated” as it is, could be run for less than $5 million. “I don’t know if he even has to pay people. The economy is so bad, [and] this is work a lot of people want to do,” says Tarzi.

Bin Laden gains more power by spreading money around. Cohen calls him “the Ford Foundation of terror–he has his own people, and he funds others.”

Cohen says Bin Laden transfers money from country to country through what is known as the Hundi system. Hundi is a well-established means of money transfer that avoids banks and other official organs. It works by an individual simply going to his barber or grocer in, say, the Sudan, and asking him to place a call to his relative in, for example, Florida, who gives the money to the designated recipient. The transfer agent gives a chit to the transferor and charges a small commission. Since Hundi is totally decentralized and based on personal friendship, it can be difficult for authorities to stop.

Bin Laden is not the only one with the means to fund terror. There are others in Afghanistan who might have funded this attack or others. Tarzi mentions Jamaa Al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad, both of which are run by Afghan-based Egyptians and who receive substantial support from outside Afghanistan.

Says Tarzi: “Afghanistan has become a black hole and a swamp. Bin Laden is just one mosquito in that swamp.”